Category: NVMe over Fabrics

NVMe®/TCP Q&A

Erik Smith
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) had an outstanding response to our live webinar, “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment, and Automation.” If you missed the session, you can watch it on-demand and download a copy of the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our live audience gave the presentation a 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5, and they asked a lot of detailed questions, which our presenter, Erik Smith, Vice Chair of SNIA NSF, has answered here. Q: Does the Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) layer also provide drive access control or is it simply for discovery of drives visible on the network? A: As defined in TP8010, the CDC only provides transport layer discovery. In other words, the CDC will allow a host to discover transport layer information (IP, Port, NQN) about the subsystem ports (on the array) that each host has been allowed to communicate with. Provisioning storage volumes to a particular host is additional functionality that COULD be added to an implementation of the CDC. (e.g., Dell has a CDC implementation that we refer to as SmartFabric Storage Software (SFSS). Q: Can you provide some examples of companies that provide CDC and drive access control functionalities? Read More

Considerations and Options for NVMe/TCP Deployment

David McIntyre
NVMe®/TCP has gained a lot of attention over the last several years due to its great performance characteristics and relatively low cost. Since its ratification in 2018, the NVMe/TCP protocol has been enhanced to add features such as Discovery Automation, Authentication and Secure Channels that make it more suitable for use in enterprise environments. Now as organizations evaluate their options and consider adopting NVMe/TCP for use in their environment, many find they need a bit more information before deciding how to move forward. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webinar on July 19, 2023 “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment and Automation” where we will provide an overview of deployment considerations and options, and answer questions such as: Read More

xPU Accelerator Offload Functions

David McIntyre
As covered in our first xPU webcast “SmartNICs and xPUs: Why is the Use of Accelerators Accelerating,” we discussed the trend to deploy dedicated accelerator chips to assist or offload the main CPU. These new accelerators (xPUs) have multiple names such as SmartNIC, DPU, IPU, APU, NAPU. If you missed the presentation, I encourage you to check it out in the SNIA Educational Library where you can watch it on-demand and access the presentation slides. This second webcast in this SNIA Networking Storage Forum xPU webcast series is “xPU Accelerator Offload Functions” where our SNIA experts will take a deeper dive into the accelerator offload functions of the xPU. We’ll discuss what problems the xPUs are coming to solve, where in the system they live, and the functions they implement, focusing on: Read More

A Q&A on Discovery Automation for NVMe-oF IP-Based SANs

Tom Friend
In order to fully unlock the potential of the NVMe® IP based SANs, we first need to address the manual and error prone process that is currently used to establish connectivity between NVMe Hosts and NVM subsystems. Several leading companies in the industry have joined together through NVM Express to collaborate on innovations to simplify and automate this discovery process. This was the topic of discussion at our recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast “NVMe-oF: Discovery Automation for IP-based SANs” where our experts, Erik Smith and Curtis Ballard, took a deep dive on the work that is being done to address these issues. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on demand here and get a copy of the slides. Erik and Curtis did not have time to answer all the questions during the live presentation. As promised, here are answers to them all. Q. Is the Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) highly available, and is this visible to the hosts?  Do they see a pair of CDCs on the network and retry requests to a secondary if a primary is not available? Read More

Automating Discovery for NVMe IP-based SANs

Erik Smith
NVMe® IP-based SANs (including transports such as TCP, RoCE, and iWARP) have the potential to provide significant benefits in application environments ranging from the Edge to the Data Center. However, before we can fully unlock the potential of the NVMe IP-based SAN, we first need to address the manual and error prone process that is currently used to establish connectivity between NVMe Hosts and NVM subsystems.  This process includes administrators explicitly configuring each Host to access the appropriate NVM subsystems in their environment. In addition, any time an NVM Subsystem interface is added or removed, a Host administrator may need to explicitly update the configuration of impacted hosts to reflect this change. Due to the decentralized nature of this configuration process, using it to manage connectivity for more than a few Host and NVM subsystem interfaces is impractical and adds complexity when deploying an NVMe IP-based SAN in environments that require a high-degrees of automation. Read More

Q&A: Security of Data on NVMe-oF

John Kim
Ensuring the security of data on NVMe over Fabrics was the topic of our SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast “Security of Data on NVMe over Fabrics, the Armored Truck Way.” During the webcast our experts outlined industry trends, potential threats, security best practices and much more. The live audience asked several interesting questions and here are answers to them. Q. Does use of strong authentication and network encryption ensure I will be compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, CCPA, etc.? A. Not by themselves. Proper use of strong authentication and network encryption will reduce the risk of data theft or improper data access, which can help achieve compliance with data privacy regulations. But full compliance also requires establishment of proper processes, employee training, system testing and monitoring. Compliance may also require regular reviews and audits of systems and processes plus the involvement of lawyers and compliance consultants. Q. Does using encryption on the wire such as IPsec, FC_ESP, or TLS protect against ransomware, man-in-the middle attacks, or physical theft of the storage system? Read More

Protecting NVMe over Fabrics Data from Day One, The Armored Truck Way

John Kim
With ever increasing threat vectors both inside and outside the data center, a compromised customer dataset can quickly result in a torrent of lost business data, eroded trust, significant penalties, and potential lawsuits. Potential vulnerabilities exist at every point when scaling out NVMe® storage, which requires data to be secured every time it leaves a server or the storage media, not just when leaving the data center. NVMe over Fabrics is poised to be the one of the most dominant storage transports of the future and securing and validating the vast amounts of data that will traverse this fabric is not just prudent, but paramount. Read More

A Q&A on NVMe-oF Performance Hero Numbers

Alex McDonald
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast “NVMe-oF: Looking Beyond Performance Hero Numbers.”It was extremely popular, in fact it has been viewed almost 800 times in just two weeks! If you missed it, it’s available on-demand, along with the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our audience asked several great questions during the live event and our expert presenters, Erik Smith, Rob Davis and Nishant Lodha have kindly answered them all here. Q. There are initiators for Linux but not for Windows? What are my options to connect NVMe-oF to Windows Server? Read More

NVMe® over Fabrics for Absolute Beginners

J Metz
A while back I write an article entitled “NVMe™ for Absolute Beginners.” It seems to have resonated with a lot of people and it appears there might be a call for doing the same thing for NVMe® over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™). This article is for absolute beginners. If you are a seasoned (or even moderately-experienced) technical person, this probably won’t be news to you. However, you are free (and encouraged!) to point people to this article who need Plain English™ to get started. A Quick Refresher Any time an application on a computer (or server, or even a consumer device like a phone) needs to talk to a storage device, there are a couple of things that you need to have. First, you need to have memory (like RAM), you need to have a CPU, and you also need to have something that can hold onto your data for the long haul (also called storage). Another thing you need to have is a way for the CPU to talk to the memory device (on one hand) and the storage device (on the other). Thing is, CPUs talk a very specific language, and historically memory could speak that language, but storage could not. For many years, things ambled along in this way. The CPU would talk natively with memory, which made it very fast but also was somewhat risky because memory was considered volatile. That is, if there was a power blip (or went out completely), any data in memory would be wiped out. Not fun. Read More

Beyond NVMe-oF Performance Hero Numbers

Erik Smith
When it comes to selecting the right NVMe over Fabrics™ (NVMe-oF™) solution, one should look beyond test results that demonstrate NVMe-oF’s dramatic reduction in latency and consider the other, more important, questions such as “How does the transport really impact application performance?” and “How does the transport holistically fit into my environment?” To date, the focus has been on specialized fabrics like RDMA (e.g., RoCE) because it provides the lowest possible latency, as well as Fibre Channel because it is generally considered to be the most reliable. However, with the introduction of NVMe-oF/TCP this conversation must be expanded to also include considerations regarding scale, cost, and operations. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a webcast series that will dive into answering these questions beyond the standard answer “it depends.” Read More